The poor girl, to be honest if there was any other contender to the title of the unluckiest warship in naval history, USS Arizona has to take the cake.

Two days ago was the poor battleship's 101st birthday and I should have done this by then. And I wanted to do something to honor her and her fallen sailors, but there is no possible way to do that by now, except for this.

5311800

The poor girl, to be honest if there was any other contender to the title of the unluckiest warship in naval history, USS Arizona has to take the cake.

USS William D. Porter.

Nothing more need be said.

5311800 HMS Curacoa (D41), being split in half by the Queen Mary.

5311831 I still stand by the Willie D. as the unluckiest ship to ever sail. I cannot even begin to describe everything that happened.

So I'll just post this.

(Though the bit about the entire crew being arrested upon arrival is a rumour, not a fact.)

5311819 How unlucky was she?

5311831 There's that.

5311866 >Ripped the deck of another ship whilst leaving port with her anchor
>Accidently dropped a depth charge in a silent running area
>Hit a large swell and lost equipment and a sailor in the same run
>Lost a boiler in the same run
>Fired a torpedo at the Iowa when the President was aboard by accident, in the same run
>Failure to signal the right code to Iowa with Morse Lamp and had to break radio silence to tell her to evade
>Sent to Alaska and still managed to accidently lob a shell into a base's gardens
>Got sunk by a crashed plane

5311889 That is unlucky, however, it was Arizona's launching that sealed her own fate.

5311889 Sounds about as successful as my life.

5311893 What do you mean? That she was christened with water?

That's a superstition, that hardly counts, the Willie D.'s record is, well, a record of all the shit the ship actually did.

5311900 rip

5311911 Japanese Battleship Mutsu, that ship blew up for no reason at all.

5311932 That is bad, but the Willie D.'s rather extensive record of screw-ups kinda goes beyond merely being destroyed. The ship was thoroughly humiliated. Then destroyed.

As for no reason, there's always a reason. The Japanese investigation of the time ruled it was sabotage by a suicidal crew member, modern theories point to the Mutsu being the victim of Japan's highly flammable ship designs, and that an electrical fire started by outdated wiring heated the black powder primers in the magazine up enough to detonate them.

5311911 Yes, but there maybe more to that superstition than we may have thought if Arizona was never going to see action through out its career and end up dying in a massive explosion. But that's just me, all ways a believer of naval superstions

5311976 If the Arizona hadn't been christened with water Britain wouldn't have magically replaced its coal stockpiles with oil and the Arizona was only one of many battleships destroyed in the Pearl Harbour attack, I doubt those other battlewagons were all christened with water as well.

5312237 What does ships running on oil and coal have to do with it?

5312406 The reason the Arizona was kept from seeing action in WWI was because the British had stockpiles of coal and the Arizona was oil fired.

5313582 Right, but the fuel she runs on has nothing to do with Arizona's life of bad luck, it was all down to the ignorance of people forbidding ships being christened with champagne. No thank to that, Arizona's fate was sealed.

5313675

but the fuel she runs on has nothing to do with Arizona's life of bad luck

You stated one of the things that the Arizona had bad luck with was a lack of combat. The fact she was an oil burner was the biggest reason she wasn't sent over with the other American battleships to participate in WWI.

So, evidently, her fueling is a direct contributor.

5313771 Oh, right even so, people back then were ignorant on people christening a ship with champagne. So that can be held responsible for the cause of her bad luck, sure her modern propulsion may have kept her out of WWI, but that doesn't account the fact that during a training exercise at Hawaii, the fog was bad that they accidentally rammed into the Oklahoma causing a hole in the Big A's bow the size of a box car, and not only that she was also due for an overhaul in Washington state. So that accident basically sealed the poor battleship's fate.

5313882

people back then were ignorant on people christening a ship with champagne.

So are people today. Naval superstitions aren't well known amongst the general populace, and that one is a lesser known one in general.

sure her modern propulsion may have kept her out of WWI, but that doesn't account the fact that during a training exercise at Hawaii, the fog was bad

I'm not even going to argue with this. This is silly.

5314035 Just watch ichase's video and you'll know what I mean.

5314035 By the way, I did meantion that Arizona was scheduled for an overhaul at Washington State. What was the overhaul going to give her if she got that overhaul?

5314082 I did, I don't.

5315636 If she had gone to the overhaul she wouldn't have been at Pearl, though neither you nor the video said what she was going to get, however, blaming all this on a bottle of water is silly.

That literally would've changed nothing, not unless there was a delay from when she was launched. If the ship were launched at a slightly different time, it might've changed things through a butterfly effect of minor time changes. But even then, that's really, really stretching things, and that's if there was a difference in launch date at all. If there was no difference in launch date, there'd be no reason at all for the events to not happen at their same dates. So unless you think a bottle of water has the power to physically change the weather and such that happened on those dates... there'd be no difference.

5318929 True, and that is a possibility

5319072
In the end it was simply bad luck that the bomb hit where it did, factor into it that the Arizona's forward magazines were fully stocked and it was a recipe for disaster

5327511 Indeed